Response to Grief

Where do you put grief? Do you put it on and wear it like a garment? Do you put it on top your head and balance it there carefully? Do you put it on a shelf in the back corner of your heart? Or . . . Do you put it in your Father’s open, loving hands and let Him carry it for you? Yes, of course that’s what we want to do with our grief; who can carry it alone? It’s so heavy. The burden of carrying the weight of this grief is surely what leaves us so exhausted. Why else would we feel this way?—just tired all the time.

I am reminded of a passage from Hannah Whitall Smith’s book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. I was lucky to find the passage on the Internet just now, so I’ve copied and pasted it here for you:

I knew a Christian lady who had a very heavy temporal burden. It took away her sleep and her appetite, and there was danger of her health breaking down under it. One day, when it seemed especially heavy, she noticed lying on the table near her a little tract called "Hannah's Faith." Attracted by the title, she picked it up and began to read it, little knowing, however, that it was to create a revolution in her whole experience. The story was of a poor woman who had been carried triumphantly through a life of unusual sorrow.

She was giving the history of her life to a kind visitor on one occasion, and at the close the visitor said, feelingly, "O Hannah, I do not see how you could bear so much sorrow!"

"I did not bear it," was the quick reply; "the Lord bore it for me."

"Yes," said the visitor, "that is the right way. You must take your troubles to the Lord."

"Yes," replied Hannah, "but we must do more than that; we must leave them there. Most people," she continued, "take their burdens to Him, but they bring them away with them again, and are just as worried and unhappy as ever. But I take mine, and I leave them with Him, and come away and forget them. And if the worry comes back, I take it to Him again; I do this over and over, until at last I just forget that I have any worries, and am at perfect rest." [emphasis mine (Lisa’s)]

(This was not a column. It was a response to a family member dealing with grief.)